YNAB

I’ve been using ynab for many years. However I now just don’t have the time to research and understand all the steady stream of product changes.

I’ve been a big fan of YNAB, it has completely changed how I manage my finances for the better. Unfortunately, it has been going downhill in the last year. I can take the substantial price increases, I still think it is worth it for me. But the UX decisions being taken by the developers are becoming more and more difficult to understand. Things that were simple like reconciliation, viewing uncleared transactions etc. are now hidden away. As well as this the app is running slower with each update. Stop turning this into a bloated mess and stick to keeping it simple.

Putting a transaction’s cleared status underneath it like it’s just a tag makes it much harder to see what’s been cleared vs what hasn’t - put it back in its own column where it’s always been like it is on the web app please! 0 star rating until this is fixed…

I’ve tried every budgeting app under the sun—some looked nice, some gave me graphs, most just made me feel bad about my spending. YNAB is different. It doesn’t just track where your money went—it helps you tell it where to go. For the first time, I actually feel in control of my finances. It’s weirdly satisfying too. Assigning every pound a job, balancing categories, clearing transactions… it scratches an itch I didn’t know I had. Like tidying up but for your bank account. It takes a little time to learn, but once it clicks, it’s transformative. No more guilt, no more confusion—just clarity and a quiet confidence about money I never thought I’d have. Other apps feel like toys now. This is the real deal.

This has been my favourite app for the last ten years and transformed how I did my budgeting. It was super-easy to use and reliable and just ‘worked’ exactly as I needed it to, despite a few annoyances (such as the removal of the ability to carry over negative budgets to new months for work expenses.) In the last year unfortunately things have gone downhill. The app feels laggy to use (on a new device) and background sync from accounts now works only intermittently; I find myself regularly having to force quit the app to get transactions to appear (I can see them in the register, they won’t appear on the budget page.) There have been lots of design changes recently, the majority of which have made the product harder to use. Selecting multiple transactions now requires pressing a select button placed unhelpfully at the top of the screen. New transactions now appear on the budget screen, which requires jumping between budgets and transactions to accept new transactions, import pending transactions and reconciling. Pinned categories are now in a new ‘Spotlight’ screen, which again requires another press to access, rather than just being ‘there’. Everything feels a lot more cumbersome to use and what used to feel seamless is now feeling like a bit of a hassle. I’ll still keep using the app, as it’s the best out there and was outstanding (and would be 5 stars still without the recent changes), but I’ve started testing out other options. I’d love the devs to focus on adding new charts and features rather than constantly redesigning what works well, to worse effect.

Now an update removes the pinned category and puts it into some unjustified second screen "Spotlight" that is also less information dense. It's even more stupid than that as these pinned categories are literally not visible if I try and look at future months. Those spotlight categories are also useless if you click on them they are not editable. I can replicate with saved "views" but these are not as information dense as previous. Yet another recent change seems needlessly to remove the little indicator to say a transaction is cleared, leaving instead a label that is harder to scan. Again, a long series of retrograde steps adding taps where previously using it was efficient, and removing functionality and ease of use. Can you go back to spending your developer time not changing ease of use things please. These recent changes are all missing the mark in a big way and will make me move on. Shades of SONOS mismanagement and should be more careful.

The Usability of this app is steadily degrading. It feels like the designers are guessing rather than researching and testing. I’ve now missed uncategorised transactions because they’ve hidden it behind a vanity ux second screen. Was a five star app. BTW, this also applies to the iPad version.

The Usability of this app is steadily degrading. It feels like the designers are guessing rather than researching and testing. I’ve now missed uncategorised transactions because they’ve hidden it behind a vanity ux second screen. Was a five star app.

So the apps are really good. I like the way that is really simple and I’m 14 years old so it helps me keep my money instead of spending it all like get rid of my spending habit you know so the only downside of this app is the fact that there’s money like you have to pay after a certain amount of time, which I don’t like that you need to do that because like like this is this app has helped me and I’ve saved up a lot of money so far like I haven’t been spending more money lately now so if like someone sees this developer see this like tell me if I can use it without paying if it free part or something to it because you’re saying I have to pay after a certain while

Now an update removes the pinned category and puts it into some unjustified second screen "Spotlight" that is also less information dense. It's even more stupid than that as these pinned categories are literally not visible if I try and look at future months. Again, a bunch of retrograde steps adding taps where previously using it was efficient, and removing functionality. Can you go back to spending your developer time not changing ease of use things please. These recent changes are all missing the mark in a big way and will make me move on. Shades of SONOS mismanagement and should be more careful.